Regruntled.com

Please accept with no obligation, implicit or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter solstice, or spring solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all . . . and a financially successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated experience during the generally accepted calendar year 2008, or, if that is not your calendar of choice, the approximate period from the current solstice until the following winter solstice, or spring solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform, or sexual orientation of the wishee.

No elves were exploited, and no animals were harmed, during the wishing of this wish.

By accepting this wish, you agree to these terms:

• This wish is subject to clarification, revocation or withdrawal at the sole discretion of the wisher.
• This wish may not be transferred without the written consent of the wisher.
• This wish implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wished-for conditions on behalf of the wishee.
• This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent solstice greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.
• This wish is void in the State of Nebraska and wherever prohibited by law.

Enjoy!

Maybe THIS is the future of urban transportation.

I played around with fractals way back when, but the state of the art has advanced quite a bit since then. Apophysis 2.0 is software that will generate “fractal flames“, something like fractals but way cooler. Flam3 is software that will render the individual frames of an animated fractal flame.

At 30 frames per second, and 5 seconds to render a frame, rendering takes 150 times real-time. A four-minute animation takes about ten hours to render. Then there is the time to generate the video from the stills, mix in the music and titles, and upload the thing to YouTube.

All of this doable. The computer does most of the work, while I do something else, like sleep or eat. Unfortunately, I can’t do my usual strategy of “let’s make a dozen of these and see which one we like best”. Someone needs a faster computer.

Here is an online sudoku with colors instead of numbers. I have a couple of problems doing these, due to the lack of a natural order. First, I can’t say to myself, “I’ve done the ones and twos, time to check the threes.” Second, I can’t count off a row or column to find the missing numbers.

I also notice that my internal dialog is more difficult. The words for one through nine are all one syllable, except for seven. Dark green, light green, orange, yellow… colors take more syllables. Or maybe, being a computer nerd, words, numbers and mouse clicks are all left-brain for me, while colors are right-brain. Whatever the reason, I have trouble working these.

Here’s the latest silliness from the Regruntled Computer Works: non-periodic plaids. These are constructed like normal plaids, except that the thread counts are randomized.

I rather like the patterns. I’d like to have a dress shirt made. And I’d like to watch the seamstress try to match the pattern for the pocket! OK, that’s just cruel. No pockets.

Humans tend to see patterns that aren’t there. Conversely, if they try to randomize something, they make it “too random”. I’m guilty, too. I generated lots of these plaids, and discarded the ones that didn’t “look right”.

I suspect that’s part of the reason I find the sudoku patterns so interesting. The rules of the pattern create something with the colors all mixed up. It’s not random at all, in fact it’s highly structured, but to the eye it looks random without being too random.

Here is Zack the cat, colored in a sudoku pattern. Well, not colored exactly, but color-shifted. You can still see the texture of the fur within the blocks. A sudoku needs nine numbers or colors or patterns. Doing nothing is one, I had two more from Color Shift, and three more from Horse of a Different Color. That makes six. Here I’ve added three more transformations to my palette, namely canceling the red, canceling the green and canceling the blue. That makes 9 transformations, numbered 1 through 9 and applied in a pattern based on a solved sudoku.

Here is the original picture, shamelessly ripped off from TTB at Blogospherical Ruminations:

Bicycle Forest says:

“The treadmill bike is the future of urban transportation!”

In a Ben Bridge commercial, I heard a reference to platinum, “the purest of metals”. This is complete nonsense, since purity is not an attribute of chemical elements. It makes sense to say that a particular piece of metal is more or less pure platinum, but it does not make sense to say that platinum itself is pure. Nor is purity a particularly desirable attribute! We make alloys for all sorts of good reasons.

I did some googling, and found that “the purest of metals” is a common marketing phrase in the jewelry business. Most platinum jewelry is either 90% pure (10% iridium) or 95% pure (5% ruthenium). In comparison, sterling silver is 92.5% pure, and 22K gold is 91.7% pure.

However, the aluminum foil in your kitchen is 98.5% pure! So, this holiday season, if you care enough to give your loved ones “the purest of metals”, forget platinum. It’s not that pure. Instead, give them lovingly wadded lumps of 98.5% pure aluminum.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw and graduate student Matthew Weinzierl have proposed taxing tall people at a higher rate than short people. Their argument is twofold. First, height correlates with income, so tall people have more money, which means that a tall tax will bring in more revenue. Second, people can’t change their height, so taxing tall people doesn’t create economic distortions, as opposed to taxing the industrious, which discourages them from working so hard.

Do Mankiw and Weinzierl actually endorse such a system? Far from it. Rather, they argue, the proposed tax clarifies our thinking about taxation in general. They say that height is a “justly acquired endowment”: it is not unfairly wrested from anyone else, so the state has no right to seize its fruits. By the same logic, they imply (though they do not state outright) that the government has no right to force someone with the “justly acquired endowment” of entrepreneurial genius to pay a higher tax rate.

I think Mankiw and Weinzierl are missing the best argument for the tall tax, namely “What about the CHILDREN?” Children are short! Especially young children. The tall tax is good for children, and good for America. All we need is a Presidential candidate to champion the tall tax. Are you listening, Dennis Kucinich?